Reading Guide to Latour, pages 13-20—Making an honest
attempt at each question gives you 10 points on your test.
(I put words in italics when I am giving you a definition.)
2.1 The Modern Constitution
“Humanism” – a way of life/thought that sees the world not through reference to the
divine (be it a personal Creator God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam or the impersonal
Forms of Plato) but through reference to the human being.
1. On page 13, why does Latour object to defining modernity (or the Enlightenment)
as humanism?
2. He argues instead that the separation between the natural world and the social
world is the key division that produced our modern world. He uses the analogy of
the US Constitution to explain what he means: can you explain how this analogy
works?
3. Do we use this Constitution to analyze other cultures? Why or why not?
In order to analyze this Constitution, he turns to the conflict between Boyle and Hobbes
that we talked about in the previous class.
2.2 Boyle and His Objects
1. On page 16, the key point is: “In this passage, they do not show how the social
context of Eng might justify the development of Boyle’s physics and the failure of
Hobbes’ mathematical theories. Far from situating Boyle’s scientific works in their
social context or showing how politics (external) presses in on science, they examine
how B and H fought to invent a science, a context, and the demarcation btw the two.
They are not prepared to explain the content by the context, since neither existed in
this new way BEFORE Boyle and Hobbes reached their respective goals and settled
their differences.” Re-state this point in your own words.
2. What role did witnesses play for Boyle (as thus, for the empirical style that science
uses even today?
2.3 Hobbes and His Subjects
1. Why does Hobbes’ think that Boyle’s experimental way was dangerous to the
social order?
2. Why does Hobbes think that inert and mechanical matter is essential to civil peace?
3. Hobbes thought that if you have one source of authority for truth/knowledge and
another source of authority for society, you will keep having wars like England was
having. Why?
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